‘Kong: Skull Island’ director finally gets to work with his longtime hero: Kong

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Mar 2, 2017 at 1:41 PMMar 2, 2017 at 1:41 PM

Ed Symkus More Content Now

Jordan Vogt-Roberts had directed plenty of TV episodes, short films, and commercials, but only one feature — the 2013 comedy-drama “The Kings of Summer” — before getting his shot at the big time with “Kong: Skull Island.” The 32-year-old filmmaker directed the film and worked with screenwriter Max Borenstein in hitting all the right notes in the script. Vogt-Roberts, proudly wearing a beard that covers his chest, recently sat down in a Los Angeles hotel and spoke excitedly about his longtime adoration of all things Kong and what it was like to get the gig.

Q: You’d only made one feature film. How did this one originally fall into your lap?

A: Legendary-Warner Bros. came to me with a script. “The Kings of Summer” came out and was well received, and I was sending the message that I wanted to do a big movie. Because I grew up on big films, and big films are what ultimately led me to be a cinephile. As a kid I wasn’t watching “Bringing Up Baby” or “Sunset Boulevard” or “The Searchers.” I was watching “The Thing” and “Blade Runner” and “Star Wars” and “Die Hard.” But my love of those films made me think, wait a second, what are all these old ones, what are these foreign ones, what are all these art house movies? That’s what led me to discover and love Kurosawa and John Ford and Peckinpah. But I still had a love of big movies, and I wanted to do one. I was very vocal about that. So I got a call from a producer I was working with who said, “We want you to read this thing. It’s a new Kong and is meant to tie in with Godzilla.” My first response was, “Awesome!” But my second response, in my head, was “How am I going to do this? Why should this movie exist? What purpose does it have in 2017?” They sent me a script that took place in 1917, so it was old movie. It was very different from what the movie became. I went in and said, “This isn’t for me. I can’t make this version of the movie. I don’t know why it needs to exist and I don’t know why audiences will think it needs to exist.” The amazing thing about Legendary and Warner Bros. is they said, “OK, what version would you make?” So I went away for the weekend, and these images started flashing in my head — of Kong silhouetted by choppers in a sunset, and Jimi Hendrix playing, and suddenly this idea of “Apocalypse Now” and “King Kong” popped into my head and I thought, “OK, I would make a Vietnam War movie with monsters.” Because I’d never seen that, and I think a big part of going to the movies is being shown new things. I became so obsessed with this idea, from an esthetic level, from the genre mash-up of choppers and napalm and Hendrix and monsters, and from a thematic level, from the character level. I honestly went into that pitch thinking they were going to laugh me out of the room. But they didn’t. Instead they said, “OK, let’s do this movie.” And I said, “What? Excuse me?”

Q: You’ve said in past interviews that you’ve been a Kong fan for a long time. How long?

A: I used to watch these “Making of” shows, I think on the History Channel. They would do something on “Jason and the Argonauts,” and have all these behind the scenes segments, like how stop-motion was done. And there was a “King Kong” episode I saw when I was 9 or 10. I remember saying, “What is THIS?” Kong is a piece of pop culture and a piece of iconography that transcends pop culture. So I knew who Kong was well before I saw the film. I knew the imagery. I used to go to my library when I was a kid, and they had these movie monster books. I would see pictures of Kong on the Empire State Building, and my imagination was full with these stories of Kong and the lore of Kong. My dad bought a 12-inch plastic action figure of Kong at a garage sale, and it would sit on my dresser as a kid. When I finally did see the film in my early teens, the amazing thing about it was that it was so captivating, had such impeccable storytelling. The effects work, and everything about it is ... well, it’s still a masterpiece.

Q: What was the idea behind setting the film in the mid-1970s instead of 1917?

A: I loved the idea of taking characters who were disillusioned by the Vietnam War, and sending them to an island that been discovered by satellites that we had just put in the sky. Then they realize, “We don’t belong here.” And they’re put back in the food chain. We as humans have removed ourselves from the food chain, so what happens when you’re put back in it, when you’re confronted by myth, confronted with these things that we’ve killed in modern society? So I thought that was a pretty good jumping off point.

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